The Commune Movement During the 1960S and the 1970S in Britain, Denmark and The
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The Commune Movement during the 1960s and the 1970s in Britain, Denmark and the United States Sangdon Lee Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of History September 2016 i The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement ⓒ 2016 The University of Leeds and Sangdon Lee The right of Sangdon Lee to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 ii Abstract The communal revival that began in the mid-1960s developed into a new mode of activism, ‘communal activism’ or the ‘commune movement’, forming its own politics, lifestyle and ideology. Communal activism spread and flourished until the mid-1970s in many parts of the world. To analyse this global phenomenon, this thesis explores the similarities and differences between the commune movements of Denmark, UK and the US. By examining the motivations for the communal revival, links with 1960s radicalism, communes’ praxis and outward-facing activities, and the crisis within the commune movement and responses to it, this thesis places communal activism within the context of wider social movements for social change. Challenging existing interpretations which have understood the communal revival as an alternative living experiment to the nuclear family, or as a smaller part of the counter-culture, this thesis argues that the commune participants created varied and new experiments for a total revolution against the prevailing social order and its dominant values and institutions, including the patriarchal family and capitalism. Communards embraced autonomy and solidarity based on individual communes’ situations and tended to reject charismatic leadership. Functioning as an independent entity, each commune engaged with their local communities designing various political and cultural projects. They interacted with other social movements groups through collective work for the women’s liberation and environmentalist movement. As a genuine grass root social movement communal activism became an essential part of Left politics bridging the 1960s and 1970s. iii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1. The Revival of Communal Activism 16 Early communal experiments 18 Modified anarchism on com m un e s 2 1 The impact of the New Left on communes 35 Countercultural implications for communes 48 2. C oncept s for Communal Activism 60 Decentralism 62 Federalism, small is not necessarily beautiful 72 N o m a d i s m 84 3. Activities for Communal Activism 98 Feminist movement 99 Environmental movement 109 Cultural and educational experiments 115 Engagement with their local societies as political outreach 128 4. Crisis and Transformation 145 iv C r i s i s 149 Transformation 162 C o n c l u s i o n 185 Bibliography 195 v List of Abbreviations Britain AHIMSA Agriculture and Hand-Industries Mutual Support CN Communes Network CND Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament CRAG Community Research and Action Group SCRAM Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace VSC Vietnam Solidarity Campaign United States BPP Black Panther Party CCNV Community for Creative Non-Violence ERAP Economic Research and Action Project LNS Liberation News Service MNS Movement for a New Society NOFA Natural Organic Farmers’ Association NOPE Nuclear Objectors for a Pure Environment SDS Students for a Democratic Society SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee vi SMC Student Mobilization Committee SWP Socialist Workers Party YAF Young Americans for Freedom YSA Young Socialist Alliance Denmark CANW Kampagnen mod Atomvåben (Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons) DKP Danmarks Kommunistiske Parti (Denmark Communist Party) Kokoo Kollektiv Koordineringen (Collective coordination) SAK Socialistisk Arbejderkreds (Socialistic Working Group) SF Socialistisk Folkeparti (Socialist People’s Party) SOKO Socialistisk Kollektivforening (Socialist Commune Association) VS Venstresocialisterne (Left Socialists) vii Introduction When members of the Red Clover commune relocated from New York to a farm house in Putney, Vermont in 1969, they were, by their own admission, unaware of the region’s rich tradition of communal living. During the early 1800s John Humphrey Noyes, who founded the religious Oneida community in New York in 1847, had experimented with communal living with The Putney Research Community.1 In the twentieth century, the aftermath of the Great Depression saw a number of socialists move to Putney, where they built alternative institutions like the Putney Co-up and Credit Union.2 Yet, a survey of over two hundred communards in the US conducted in 1974 by the sociologist Benjamin Zablocki revealed a startling lack of knowledge of the historical background of communes, with the exception of some ongoing communes such as Kibbutz, Walden Two, and Synanon. 3 There were, of course, some commune joiners in the 1960s and 1970s who recognised the long history through their personal experience of communal living. The two Danish communards Morten Thing and Vibeke Hemmel, for instance, spent some years on a kibbutz in Israel, before joining Brøndby Strand, a commune in Copenhagen in 1970.4 Communal living was not new and had been seen before, indeed since its inception in the 17th century when ‘the British Diggers’, a group of peasants, started three rural communes.5 For activists and hippies in the 1960s, shifting away 1 Yaacov Oved, Two Hundred Years of American Communes (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1988), pp. 170-173. 2 Steven Reiner, ‘Discovering Putney’, The First Issue (1971), p. 6. 3 Benjamin David Zablocki, Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes (New York: The Free Press, 1980), pp. 43-44. 4 Started in the early 1910s as a utopian community by young Jews who moved to Palestine from Russia, it was influenced by Zionism. Melford E. Spiro, ‘Utopia and Its Discontents: The Kibbutz and Its Historical Vicissitudes’, American Anthropologist, New Series, 106. 3 (Sep 2004), pp. 556-568 (p. 557). John Davis and Anette Warring, ‘Living Utopia: communal living in Denmark and Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 8. 4 (2011), pp. 513-530 (p. 516). 5 For British society, it has been assumed that communal experiments have not vanished for a thousand years. - 1 - from their traditional protest spheres and conventional family relations, setting up communes was a process of continuation from the older tradition of communal living. Nevertheless, it is not clear to what extent previous communes galvanised the founders of 1960s communes. Indeed, the communal revival of the 1960s came as something of a surprise, given the moribund state of communal activism during the previous decade. Writing in 1959, the historian Everett Webber predicted no further emergence of communal life, concluding that “the song is done.”6 Meanwhile, historians focused on the communal life of previous eras such as cases from the nineteenth century by the Shakers, the Oneida Community, the Fourierists, and the Owenites, and some even claimed that communal experiments had ended around the time of the Civil War.7 However, contrary to Webber’s assumption, communal living attracted many thousands of young people in the 1960s and was eventually revived throughout the world. Communes that emerged during the 1960s shared with their historical predecessors a number of features. They included various types ranging from religious and spiritual communes to political ones. What united most experiments of communal living, however, was that communards voluntarily chose poor living conditions with like-minded people and produced self-sufficient independent living communities, and their mostly brief existence. Despite these similarities, however, the communes of the 1960s and 1970s were new and unique. Given the number, age and class of communards involved, they represented more Clem Gorman, People Together (Frogmore, Herts: Paladin, 1975), p. 45. Philip Abrams and Andrew McCulloch, Communes, Sociology and Society (London: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 1. 6 Everett Webber, Escape to Utopia: the Communal Movement in America (New York: Hastings House, 1959) Quoted in Elinor Lander Horwitz, Communes in America: The Place Just Right (Philadelphia & NY: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1972), p. 146. 7 For example, Arthur Bestor, Jr., Backwoods Utopias:The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1829 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1970), pp. 250-52. Quoted in Timothy Miller, ‘The roots of the 1960s communal revival’, American Studies, 33. 2 (fall, 1992), pp. 73-93 (p. 75). - 2 - diverse aims challenging all aspects of life such as gender inequality, ecological degradation, and racism while also extending geographically to include urban and rural areas. More importantly, the commune members of the 1960s and 1970s tried not to restrict their area of activity to life in the communes themselves but attempted to reach out through active political engagements with their local communities instead. Consequently, it is essential to place the commune movement within the history of 1960s activism. It is not possible to understand the communal movement of 1965-1975 without having some awareness of the underlying